The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [8]
So does my brain dedicate one apparatus to making the dream world and another to the waking world? No, it doesn’t. In terms of cerebral function, the dream mechanism doesn’t flick off when I wake up. The same visual cortex in the rear of my skull allows me to see an object—a tree, a face, the sky—whether I am seeing it in memory, in a dream, in a photo, or standing before me. The locations of brain cell activity shift slightly from one to the other, which is why I can distinguish among a dream, a photo, and the real thing, yet the same fundamental process is constantly taking place. I am manufacturing a tree, a face, or the sky from what is actually a random tangle of spidery nerves shooting bursts of chemicals and electrical charges in my brain and all around my body. No matter how hard I try, I will never find a single pattern of chemicals and charges in the shape of a tree, a face, or any other shape. There is just a fire-storm of electrochemical activity.
This embarrassing problem—that there is no way to prove the existence of an outside world—undermines the entire basis of materialism. Thus we arrive at the second spiritual secret: You are not in the world; the world is in you.
The only reason that rocks are solid is that the brain registers a flurry of electrical signals as touch; the only reason the sun shines is that the brain registers another flurry of electrical signals as sight. There is no sunlight in my brain, whose interior remains as dark as a limestone cavern no matter how bright it is outside.
Having said that the whole world is created in me, I immediately realize that you could say the same thing. Are you in my dream or am I in yours—or are we all trapped in some bizarre combination of each other’s personal version of events? To me, this isn’t a problem but the very heart of spirituality. Everyone is a creator. The mystery of how all these individual viewpoints somehow mesh, so that your world and mine can harmonize, is the very thing that makes people seek spiritual answers. For there is no doubt that reality is full of conflict but also full of harmony. It is very liberating to realize that as creators we generate every aspect, good or bad, of our experience. In this way, each of us is the center of creation.
People used to find these ideas very natural. Centuries ago the doctrine of one reality occupied center stage in spiritual life. Religions and peoples and traditions varied wildly, but there was universal agreement that the world is a seamless creation imbued with one intelligence, one creative design. Monotheism called the one reality God; India called it Brahman; China called it the Tao. By any name, every person existed within this infinite intelligence, and whatever we did on our own was part of creation’s grand design. A person didn’t have to become a spiritual seeker to find the one reality. Everybody’s life already fit into it. The creator permeated each particle of creation equally, and the same divine spark animated life in all its forms.
Today we’d call this view mystical because it deals in invisible things. But if our ancestors had had access to microscopes, wouldn’t they have seen concrete proof of their mysticism in the way cells behave? To believe in an all-embracing reality places everyone at the center of existence. The mystical symbol for this was a circle with a dot in the center, signifying that each individual (the dot) was secretly infinite (the circle). This is like the tiny cell whose central dot of DNA connects it to billions of years of evolution.
But is the concept of one reality mystical at all? Outside my window in winter I can usually spy at least one chrysalis dangling from a branch. Inside it a caterpillar has turned into a pupa that will emerge in spring as a butterfly. We are all familiar with this metamorphosis, having witnessed it as children (or by reading Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar). But what goes on invisibly inside the chrysalis remains deeply mysterious.